Continuing with the last of my series of plane questions, this newbie asked the following question of a seller on ebay.

Q: “Is the sole flat?”

A: “Sole is typical, which is flat from the tail to about 1 1/2” from the nose, where it starts to rise a few thousandths. I Checked a few other Stanley planes I have and they are all like that. So this plane is typical.”

I probably have less experience than you but my gut feeling here is that if the toe is out by as much as .003 (“a few”, as he says), that means I have, according to him, about 8 1/2 ” or so to knock down by that much. That seems like a lot. There is a lot of knowledge in the brains of those on this site and I’m hoping they will tell me if I’m wrong.

In my personal experience, I had never worry about how flat the sole it is, all of my planes came either from eBay or flea markets, I’ll do the whole restoration process and just try to “flattened” the sole on a piece of granite with some 220 wet/dry sand paper, I won’t stress out on this, just a quick run on the sand paper, I see very hard that .003” will affect on anything at all, after all we are working with wood and not making highly precision machinery.If you need something to be dead flat, perhaps you need to look on the premium planes.

I know a guy (from another website) who grinds them off and claim to hold a tolerance within .0005” of flatness on a No8, I haven’t use his services yet so I can’t verify if this is true, but again I don’t worry about that, perhaps a crack will be a red flag to me.

-- The things I make may be for others, but how I make them is for me.

You asked if the seller’s response is true. May be, but if his experience is that this is typical, he has had some great fortune in selecting planes. That is much better than mine.

.003 is flat as far as planes go. Look at all the planes on e-bay, in garages, at yard sales and antique stores. Most are worn much more than that, and they were making a living for the guy that used them. You can buy ones ground to the 1/2 thousandth tolerance, and you will pay upwards of $300. Unless you are extremely skilled in its use and the art of sharpening the iron, you will not achieve an appreciable better end product between the two.

Precision ground granite will give you a tighter tolerance. Float glass won’t, and it is still a great medium for flattening soles. When you consider the distance from the front of the sole to the iron, you will affect the depth of cut less than 1/ 100,000th of an inch if you have a .003 difference between the front of the toe and the mouth.